When I saw that Dennis Jerz, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Cs, quoted my “provocative, if vague, observation” several days ago that “Most of us know that the theories of Landow and Negroponte lie broken and useless” (and its subsequent question of how we might “we begin to build rigorous theoretical models that help us to account for the phenomena described by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy”), I had to grin, knowing full well that it had been a half-assed way to wrap up a post that didn’t quite do justice to the excellent presentations given by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy.
Part of my difficulty was that the panel presentations seem to pretty much speak for themselves, and since they’re available online (looking now, Terra’s seems to be down: ?), there wasn’t much point to doing the kind of summary-analysis-questioning routine I’d done for the other panels I wrote about here. Kinda funny that my uncertainty about how much to summarize left me in much the same position students seem to find themselves in when working on a research paper or documented essay: how much do I summarize here and what do I say about it when I’m done? Dennis, being the good teacher that he is, recognized the tendency immediately — as I hope I might have if I’d had a bit more distance.
I was going to write more about Varoufakis and the way he critiques some of the economic ideologies of individual choice, but I’m tired and my notes are looking more complicated than I have the energy for at this point in the evening. Maybe there’s a point to be made about Althusserian overdetermination and the attempts to categorize such online genres as weblogs in looking at my CCCC notes — since some unarticulated questions about genre and its relation to disciplinarity, scholarship, and pedagogy seemed to lurk behind some of the points all three presenters made — but it’s not going to get made tonight.
The journalist-bloggers have Andrew Orlowski to stir them up… the hypertext theorists had Sven Birkerts… President Reagan had The Evil Empire. Is part of the problem that bloggers simply agree with each other too much? Do we need to propose a round-table stuffed with academic arguments that challenge all that we believe is cool and true about blogs?
I wonder if it’s way to make the real community of bloggers match the imagined communities of blogs, SNSs, etc. (Benedict Anderson again).
Have to wonder whether all the agreement is a way of hedging against the inevitable disagreements that happen, since they have, from time to time, been known to be bilious and nasty.
Or it could be that almost no one is invested in any version of Blog history or the Blog discipline. Most academic catfights seem to grow out of real and perceived threats to one’s most dearly held views of one’s discipline.
I figure Mike’s dissertation will rigorously define upper, middle and working class blogs, thus providing us a theoretical basis for choosing up sides and pissing at one another.
Dennis, I think a panel on “The problems with weblogging” would be interesting — my natural tendency, of course, is towards critique. There is stuff written that’s critical of weblogs, but most of it’s pretty uninformed or stereotyped.
Although I’ll note — partly in response to John — as I briefly have before that weblogging might be considered one of Veblen’s practices of “conspicuous leisure”.